1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the editing of recorded material such as audio and/or video material.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Audio/video edit controllers are used to edit a number of xe2x80x9crawxe2x80x9d source material sequences into a final program or part of a program. For example, a short news story may contain brief excerpts of a number of different video sequences, possibly including newly captured and older, archived sequences, in order to illustrate different aspects of the news story. A relevant portion or xe2x80x9cclipxe2x80x9d of each sequence needs to be selected, and the selected portions linked together to form the composite output sequence.
Recently, computer-based non-linear edit controllers have become available. These allow a user to view the source sequences on a computer screen and to select an xe2x80x9cin-pointxe2x80x9d and an xe2x80x9cout-pointxe2x80x9d for each required sequence or clip using the computer keyboard or a cursor control device such as a mouse, joystick or trackerball. The selected clips can then be ordered to form the desired output sequence. An example of such a non-linear editing system is the DNE 700 system available from Sony Corporation (Sony is a registered trademark).
Traditional linear editors are destructive in their adjustment of prior edits, overwriting previous edit decisions with new ones. In contrast, non-linear editors are non-destructive, allowing events that have been edited to the current story or output sequence to be adjusted or trimmed. Various trimming functions are available to non -linear editing, allowing edit points or selected events to be adjusted relative to their surrounding events.
It is a constant aim in the field of material editing to improve the convenience of use of the editing equipment.
This invention provides editing apparatus for controlling editing of source audio and/or video material stored as one or more source files on a storage medium to generate an edited material series of clips from the source material arranged as one or more parallel sequences of temporally successive source material clips, at least some of the clips having one or more predefined time points within the clip, the apparatus comprising:
user-controllable means for adjusting the temporal position of a start point, an end point or both of clips in the edited material series, the adjusting means being operable to adjust automatically the temporal position in steps so that at each step the temporal position is aligned with a predefined point of another clip in the same or another parallel sequence.
The invention recognises and addresses a difficulty which can occur when moving clips within an edited series. This difficulty is that on, for example, a display screen of finite resolution it can be difficult for the user to tell when the clip currently being adjusted is aligned with other temporal events such as the beginning or end of other clips, general time points, points predefined as points of interest by the user and so on.
The elegant solution provided by the invention is to allow such temporal positions to be adjusted step-wise, each step resulting in the position under adjustment being temporally aligned with a predefined point in one of the clips.
Further respective aspects of the invention are defined in the appended claims.